The history of photography is perhaps one of the oldest and the most diverse since the very first attempts at using optics and projecting pictures. Even the elements of the camera and image projection have been around for thousands of years, there were several inventions that led to the creation of photography.
Of course, one might argue that the first form of photography could be the camera obscura, which has been investigated and employed by numerous scientists and artists throughout history. This light and compact device includes a small dark chamber or box with a small opening or lens on one side. Light falls on the opening and bounces an image in the reverse of what is observed on the other surface. It gives a natural projection of the scene outside once paper or some kind of canvas is placed in the right position inside the box, giving a ‘moving picture’ effect.
The camera obscura was first conceived by Ibn al-Haytham in his Book of Optics and put to paper in 1021 AD. However, the earliest references go all the way back to the 4th and 5th centuries BC in the text called ‘Mozi’ from China and in ‘Problems’ by Aristotle. Originally, it was employed in optics and astronomy, but by the time the early photographers adopted the apparatus, they modified it with the use of the mirror or lens to enhance the projected image.
In the 16th century also were created compact cameraes obscurae that used mirror and lenses able to project images on paper to trace it. These were portable camera obscuras These were portable camera obscuras If for some reason the camera obscura had to be moved to a different location, it could be easily done as it was not a permanently installed structure. It facilitated creation of more realistic images as compared to developing them by hand. Other types of pinhole cameras, which did not involve lenses, operated on similar principles. By the 18th century, different types of camera obscuras had become staple tools for artists as drawing tools.
Early Photographic Experiments
There have been numerous critical inventions and experiments done with chemical and light sensitivity before the birth of photography. One of the earliest was made by Johann Heinrich Schulze who believed that light causes silver nitrate to darken sometime around 1724.
Thomas Wedgwood continued experimentation attempts by exposing silhouettes onto silver nitrate-coated leather in the 1790s. He could replicate the shape of objects placed on leather and the prints did not last long at all. A year later, Humphry Davy, the same scientist, was to establish that these images could be fixed by using a salt solution.
The earliest photograph and one of the first photographs ever made was by a French inventor named Nicéphore Niépce using a camera obscura to produce a photograph on paper coated with a silver chloride around 1824. This image had 8 hours of light exposure and, as one could expect, it faded quite soon.
Niépce then collaborated with Louis Daguerre who exposed a silver plated copper sheet that he treated with iodine vapor for images that could be retained in 1837. Daguerre’s process offered sharp vision and high detail, but exposures were long, typically from 20 minutes to over an hour. Further refinement of their work and the Daguerreotype process became the publicly acknowledged and first photographic process with commercial success in 1839.
The people went crazy over the Daguerreotype during the 1840s up until the time when other processes surpassed the Daguerreotype in terms of affordability and the ability to replicate images. Calotype process is also known as Talbotype which was discovered by William Henry Fox Talbot in 1841 by using paper containing silver chloride exposed to the light which produces a translucent paper negative. This could then be utilized to produce several positive print copies on paper. Talbot’s first photographic technique was in 1835, before Daguerre’s procedure but not revealed to the public until 1839.
The Wet Plate Collodion Process
The wet plate collodion process was invented by Frederick Scott Archer in 1851 and gave the subject a high-quality negative so that prints could be made from it. This grew to become the leading method for making commercial photography and documentation in the Victorian age up to the end of the 19th century.
The wet plate process involved using the glass negative that had a layer of light sensitive silver halides in a solution of collodion. To get a good photograph, it had to be spread and exposed while still wet and then immediately developed before the emulsion became dry. This made it earn the wet plate name because the camera’s photographic plate had to be coated with an emulsion which required it to be wet. This process yielded very high image quality with fine detail that could be used for printing photographs.
The wet plate process was arduous and time consuming, and cumbersome to perform in the field, but it was a very significant advancement in the ability to make better photographs that were also reproducible. Different kinds of cameras were developed for wet plate process since this method of photography started to develop and spread in the middle of the century up to the seventies.
Dry plates are one of the most important discoveries in the field of photography, and their invention revolutionized photography in many ways.
Charles Bennett in 1880 further advanced this by inventing the gelatin dry plates which were silver gelatin emulsions on glass invented by Richard Maddox in 1871. This was possible because the negative could remain sensitive to light even with the drying process, thus eliminating the need for wet processing. In the following decades, different photographers as well as inventors further developed gelatin emulsions and sensitizing dyes. Dry plate negatives made exposure a faster process than wet plate and brought portability and accessibility into photography.
Eastman and Roll Film
One of the most significant achievements was reached by George Eastman when he managed to invent a process of creating base from the nitrocellulose in 1884. His changes contributed to Kodak offering the first transparent photographic film in 1889, followed by roll film in 1891. Thus it brought about a revolution in photography where camera became much cheaper and easily movable through small handheld cameras. Eastman came up with the basic Model Brownie camera that was economically priced for the mass market in 1900. Polaroid’s development and technological and commercial skills placed photography in the ‘consumer democracy’ phase of the early twentieth century.
Color Photography
Attempts at producing colored images go back to as early as 1840 some few years after the discovery of the daguerreotype. Over the following decades, several other techniques were developed, employing glass plate and later the film processes combined with layers of emulsion and color filters.
The first coloured film was the Autochrome process that became commercially available in 1907. It was composed of small colored potato starch grains suspended in a panchromatic emulsion and spread on glass plates. Following color plate processes but color plate processes were expensive and complicated until Agfacolor introduced German first color film in 1936. This used a new emulsion coating technique that had dye couplers.
Kodachrome was first used in the year 1935 and was the first successful color film and the application of the subtractive color process. This resulted to the formation of rich, stable colour which was created in layers in an emulsion. Colour snapshots had become even more attainable in the late 1930s through Kodachrome and Agfacolor negative films targeted at amateur photographers.
Digital Photography
Digital photography can be thought to have originated in 1957 with satellite imaging experiments, however the first digital still commercial camera emerged in the 1990s, nearly 160 years after photography. Steven Sasson an engineer with Eastman Kodak constructed the first digital camera and did a demonstration with the help mounted with fairchild 100 * 100 pixel CCD area image sensor in 1975.
While the first digital cameras intended for the consumer market came out in the 1990s, their resolution did not exceed 1 mega-pixel. What blows the light of affordable compact and DLSR cameras became popular to consumers early in the 2000s. Modern technology particularly introduced the use of the digital camera in photography, which has made the process convenient, quick in processing the results and cheap to produce. Digital camera technology and usage grew rapidly prior to the new millennium and soon overtook film usage. Nowadays, we have front facing high-definition camera in our pocket in the form of mobile phones and photography has become a part of our existence.
